Crime and drug using rates did not skyrocket because of immigrants. Indeed, drug use went up because many American’s were not timid about or fearful of trying drugs. Have no market and there will be no sales.

Our drug abuse impasse belongs to us; the drug dealers, entrepreneurially, merely continue to take advantage of the marketplace. Don’t blame others for our weaknesses. Effective drug treatment programs mandate user responsibility for their substance abuse. Don’t blame the pusher; question the users and their worlds’ about assorted malfunctions which fail to give them life expedients and skills that do not require drug use.

As for the jobs issues, don’t blame the immigrants. They saw a market willing to pay them. They manipulated an economic opportunity to be paid, quite often off the books, by doing work others would not do at that payrate. For them it was a step up from their prior worlds. The majority came here to better themselves.

Equally blame the employers who hired them; they chose to give away American jobs to the least costly. Like any cost sensitive firm, they want their products produced at a lesser cost.

Pulling illegal immigrants into our workforce would be less if American companies got the same job done if they would give realistic wages to the local citizen workers.

Consider, however, that our tomatoes will surely cost more if the pickers got health insurance, retirement funds, etc.

We need to accept our portion of the onus and culpability in about these happenings. We have an unconditional duty to overhaul their etiologies. Just to make noise refurbishes nothing.

The election and its grandiloquence kept logic and personal accountability off the playing field. It indisputably tried to pass the blame to others.

Once the earth was flat. Some believed this even into the 17th century.

Once the sun and universe went around the earth. This is called geocentrism – that the earth is the center of the universe. Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei and others ultimately convinced the scientist and the lay person that our earth is quite miniscule compared to the universe, and yes, it goes around the sun – we are heliocentric.

Each of these realizations inflicted a major and agonizingly psychological blow to our self-defined station in the universe. But to early thinkers, when they looked around them, geocentrism seemed accurate. Nonetheless, science was right; people were wrong, and they had to accept it as such.

Amazingly, in 2012, nearly 25% of Americans answered that the earth goes around the sun. (ABC News)

Once the world was seen as incredibly big, always able to repair damages, to reestablish its balance and environment, and to restore itself so it could sustain us. We take, take, take, like money from a tangibly large parent who always manages to feed us.

Now we know that the earth is living just as does every animal and plant. The earth is not the place on which we live – it is a lifeform with which we live.

Harm the earth and we harm ourselves. Like a good parent, it wants to sustain us. Like a good child, we must help the parent survive.

But it seems so big. Can our tiny selves and actions truly harm it? Yes, it is smarter than any single one of us. But as a crowd of millions of little acts…the image explains itself. Consider one parent with one taxing child compared to one parent with a dozen demanding children.

Also amazingly are the many who doubt global warming; they are egocentric.

We are earth’s children. We need to sacrifice for our parent. Denying the science is an insistence that people do not want to be responsible for their lifelines. With an earth paling and ailing, we must fix those ingredients from us that add to the infliction. We must also learn if we can alter the larger natural forces. It won’t hurt if the earth is less sick because of our efforts.

The label is less important than the theme. Global warming is global damage. The fact a struggle exists to prove global damage is real rings of the past analogous battles in history. It also shows the current delaying and denying processes linked to egos fighting not to lose their egocentrism.

Once there was a giving, warm breast with limitless milk flows. But dear me, look! The breast is drying.

Once there was no global damage. Then there was. And then life as we and the earth want it to be had to change.

How to do good change? Have a child do an earth healthy act with you. Then do it again. And again. And again, and forever.

Last night I attended a meeting dealing with mental health stigma. Lots of young adults, teachers, young filmmakers, clergy, a few of we professionals, but also families of the afflicted. They all worked to extricate ourselves and our communities from the all too common fear or embarrassment of mental illness. Their messages rang out with pain and hope! Good for them – brave folks speaking about what can no longer be hidden. The take home missives were to feel safe in being honest and learning how to ask for help.

I left re-connected to an ever so palpable sensitivity. It is for the suffering of the family of the affected. This expands it so a family is defined more than by blood. It is our collective spirit. What we saw and felt that night made us cry within ourselves, to be sure, but also to cry as a community. What we saw is not of a them or me; it is of us.

The event’s primary sponsor’s ended with a preview, a stirring documentary, about their son who, burdened with a history of horrid schizophrenia, three years ago to the day took his own life. Many of us felt compelled to hug the young man’s mother from our own struggles to soothe her.

Many of those who went to her had also lost family by suicide. Many, like me, who had not so suffered, just needed to outwardly touch her and try, oh so much to try, to give her a fix of peace. Inwardly we feared life because what happened to her could happen to us. It is tendering of love to her, a reality to us, and anger at what we as a community and profession missed that might have saved those people. In all our touching was born again the certainty that in the human reality comes pain to us, but our touching can unfathomably cultivate new strength from those memories.

I went back stage to find the young man’s father. He stood in the wings, looking at a bright but vacant stage. “Thank you, “I said, touching his shoulders from behind, “thank you…” I needed to honor his bravery, to allow him time alone, and somehow shape in him that from his pain another life may be saved.

All that is well and good, but it left me pondering how inside this good man, how hard it must be, how solitary, with feelings so contemplative and poignant, to make sense out of his life.

I wanted to say the same to all who lost lives for all the wrong reasons.

What energy and purification that night brought to we who did not have mental illness but nonetheless suffered its upshots. Imagine the power given to a suffering person who is asked to join us. A first-step ticket from fear and isolation to membership and love!

There are two rudimentary notions of a grope: (1) to feel about with the hands, or (2) to search blindly or uncertainly. Both want to seize an object or answer.

Slang, however, has it as touching for one’s personal pleasure in a purely oppressive manner.

One can grope for votes or money. One can grope to solve a challenging question. Or one can grope for sexual pleasure.

But what lies within the sexual grope?

Groping is a common an occurrence in life, as many know. Sometimes it is part of a developing relationship, but the behavior must immediately stop if requested. The souring issue is that sexual groping is tremendously unaccepted in ways different than groping for votes because the respect for another person’s sexual personal space is an underpinning of our society. Sexual groping violates that keystone.

Why not just ask someone to be a sexual partner? Some might fear the wanted partner would say no. Perhaps the requester lacks the social skills to appropriately elevate a relationship into what is sexually comfortable for both people. Groping assumes the ‘receiving’ partner prefers not to be groped. The wanted cohort may say “stop that, don’t do that not now or ever!” When the groper won’t stop groping, the ‘grope’ goes into disrespect. Which leaves scars. Ask most women how they respond to groping – a very, very large number have experienced it – and many try to dismiss it as a wretched fact of life. But sometimes it is hidden more than dismissed.

The ‘grope’ skips the mutual relationship part. One subset of gropers feel an uncomfortably strong sexual drive, and these folks’ psychosocial skills are so impaired that touching is needed for some ego gratification regardless of ramifications. But there is another subset of gropers who do not have these psychological impairments. They grope from egotism; they choose not to use the usual ladder of building a relationship. It is as if the relationship building process is not required of them in the process of achieving sexual satisfaction. A quality often inhabits this second subset that the groped should be honored that they were chosen to be groped. This later groping is entirely selfish, which could, as details appear, eventually reflect an equally finicky psychopathology in someone who just happens to have assemblies of money, dominance, or other social positions.

Woefully, and which adds much confusion to the strength of a simple narrative, is that some folks don’t mind being groped if it means they can experience a special contact with an icon. Such is the footing of the groupie. This possibility then makes a final determination of the real history of the groping event so problematic until there is detailed understanding of everyone’s motivations, for only then can we finalize an accurate report of who did what to whom and with which inducements or permissions.

The variety and levels of motivations to grope or not are similar to the separation between those who truly cannot make a healthy relationship to those who have the psychosocial skills to create the healthy and mutual relationship but choose not to.

Yes, yes, it is burdened with layers and complications. But equally yes is that the vast majority of groped women are true victims. The sad fact is that so many of them strip it of reactive emotions and re-mold it as another cost of womanhood.

The outcome is uncomplicated. Fewer bees mean much less food. It’s a straightforward bond.

The country with most water and bees will dominate us all. Much trade could be in exchange for food and water. Nature may find a mean to re-balance itself, but nature’s evolution is slow and hunger is not so unflustered.

Too few people give this much reflection. Do we not believe it? Few doubt that nuclear waste and weapons can produce a nuclear winter, leaving sick or sterilized DNA unable to maintain life. We may likewise sterilize the process which makes so much of our food.

Then consider, from the below link, that “a U.N.-sponsored report released in February found that “about 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species (such as bees and butterflies) are facing extinction.” This could have major implications for world food supply, because “about 75 percent of the world’s food crops … depend at least partly on pollination.”

Many politicians differently view whether environmental regulation helps or hurts the economy. From Georgetown University law professor Lisa Heinzerling: “On the right, particularly since the Great Recession of 2007-2009, politicians have associated environmental regulation with job losses and economic decline. These claims have increased, not decreased even as the economy has improved. … In contrast, the Democratic [presidential] candidates embrace EPA’s regulatory power.” We must scientifically combine the economy and world from which our economy lives.

Tonight is Kol Nidre, the doorway to a day of self-examination of our sins, to ask for forgiveness from those against we have sinned, and to resonate with forgiveness for those who sinned against us, and do to so with a day of fasting.

The earth speaks to us with all that is needed to sustain life. At least we can thank earth for that cookery. We need to ask earth’s forgiveness for how selfish we are with earth’s generosity, and that we cannot expect our endless wantings to be indifferent to the inventive yet easily hurt balance that earth has fashioned in favor of life.

We need to believe this, to responsibly act on it, and to widely teach it. We don’t fancy seeing ourselves on the dying out list. It’s an exceedingly selfish theme for the earth and us both. But what a fantastic goal it will be! What a Kol Nidre!

Encapsulate it on a t-shirt — I Understand why we must be the bees’ best friend. If not we all suffer.

Civilized behavior is a piano opus. Sounds respect each other. Thoughtful messages then evolve from our innate and instinctive reactions to the themes and its harmonics. That is why music is universal.

Sex is also universal and mandated, for like food, clean air, and echelons of law, without it the species will vanish.

But out of place sexual activity, stemming from insistence and expectations, has no pleasant harmonics. The pure animal belief that another person should feel an honor in sexual activities with a “me” eliminates, if not offends, scars and dirties, the core of our existence. It mocks our community foundation.

That core is the distinction and beauty of mutually rewarding relationships.

The intent of sexual insistence and expectations is not giving to each other; rather it is taking from each other. It is the “what can I get that is good for me, or prevent what is bad for me, as a consequence of this sexual doing?” Where, and if, dwells the guilt?

Guilt is a funny term, for there is no guilt if a sexual concession is done to optimistically gain profit or status; in such situations agreeing to a partner’s motive may be the same, and essentially as a collaborator, to the aggressor’s insistence – it’s a mutual business cohort and not intimacy. Merely consenting to sex is not the same as painful, boundary violating and obligatory or capitulated sex. We all know that.

Friends with benefits, one would hope, rests more on mutual esteem and supplying good emotional provisions.

The price of a relationship or the ticket to a goal should never be paid for with sexual currency.

Timely and respectful sexual intimacy is a life gift, endowing us with memories and expectations of warmth. It is one of the true adult harmonics.

Our soon-to-be-electing society now speaks of sexual ethics as much as it speaks of taxes, wars, walls, and education. This is beneficial, because our society is first and foremost fertilized by how we treat each other and not how much we pay in taxes. We cannot ignore the great danger to our society that exists by mistreating our own.

Many women learn to ‘expect and dismiss’ much of how the Trump tape reflects events in their own lives. Still some carry untold scars and pollutions from sexual impropriety. This campaign leaned in this exploitative, almost to an entertainment, direction. Now it exploded and it tipped over into a discussion of an equally critical social problem. Thanks — some good occurred.

Repentance is a human growth prerequisite. But time-tested behaviors need to confirm the atonement; we need proof that repentance is not a matter of marketing convenience.

We learn a lot about ourselves from bad behavior. But do we have the desire to change? Most people, I do believe, want the change. But what about those folks who accept it as commonplace, if not predictable? Might they not protest because they agree with that philosophy? Or they are afraid to speak out?

Amanda Terrell, Ph.D., reflects on her work and how poverty impacts mental, social, and psychological healthy growth. She comments, for example, on such topics as the positive effects of the number of words a young child hears, the ever so important benefit of role models, of nutritional status, and good structuring social skills in additional to any stigma the child encounters. A podcast from the Florida Psychiatric Society at http://www.interviewlibrary.info